The pervasiveness of the Internet has transformed the way in which enterprises conduct their businesses and the way in which individuals conduct their affairs. Moreover, Internet growth continues to expand in an exponential manner.
However, the security of Internet transactions continues to be a growing concern. Malicious users and automated programs lurk on the Internet for purposes of feigning transactions, acquiring sensitive information, or just wrecking havoc on computing resources for no apparent or even rational reason.
As a result, enterprises invest huge sums of human and capital resources to detect and block security holes in their network connections. Unfortunately it seems just when a fix for one problem is made another security hole is detected or a new and different security hole is detected for a recent fix to an old problem. It often seems that hackers are always a step or two ahead of the security fixes.
One particular area where hackers or their automated programs can be found to be watching is that which is associated with network interfaces. Often an automated program may listen on a local network interface of a particular environment in a manner that is not detected. This is done by the malicious program masquerading as an innocuous or legitimate application on a server or client. The malicious program may intercept a network connection request that occurs between a legitimate client and server. Once intercepted, the malicious program knows how to generate a connection to the server and can propagate bogus connections: to degrade performance of the server, to bring the server down, to launch virus attacks on the server, and/or to perform bogus transactions with the server for purposes of uncovering sensitive information, etc.
Consequently, there is a need for techniques that improve network connection authentication.